I don’t remember making the decision, but one day I found myself holding a plane ticket to India. I did not have a plan. What I had was a pattern.

Everyone I knew who had been to India described it in almost the same way. They spoke about being overwhelmed, exhausted, irritated. Then, almost reluctantly, they would add that something had shifted while they were there. No one could explain what that shift was. They only agreed that it mattered.

The vagueness should have put me off. Instead, it did the opposite. India was never described as pleasant or comfortable. It was described as disruptive. As if the country had a habit of loosening something in people that they had not realised was tight.

India, they implied, did not offer answers. It rearranged the questions.

That idea stayed with me. Not because it sounded profound, but because it ran counter to the way I’d been taught to approach life. In the West, we are trained to move with intent: to set goals, make plans, and improve ourselves through effort and control. The American Dream isn’t about acceptance, it’s about reshaping your circumstances through persistence and ambition. India, I was told, operated on a different frequency altogether.

Perhaps this is why people feel drawn there. A key component of Eastern philosophy is surrender, allowing things to be as they are. This isn’t something we practice easily. We are encouraged to optimise, refine, and push forward, often mistaking constant motion for meaning. India, by contrast, doesn’t adapt to you. It resists your expectations, dismantles your routines, and demands adjustment simply to function within it.

This surrender is not optional. The noise, the crowds, the heat, and the unpredictability make resistance exhausting. You can’t impose order on India; you can only loosen your grip and let it carry on regardless. In that sense, the country becomes a kind of immersive therapy: not calming, not gentle, but relentless enough to force you into the present moment.

Of course, this doesn’t mean India is some spiritual playground for wandering Westerners. It is a physical and psychological test. The heat is oppressive. The dust gets everywhere. Flies settle on your skin as if you’re part of the landscape. Poverty isn’t hidden; it’s confrontational. Most people aren’t searching for enlightenment, they’re hustling to survive.

In Delhi, a man tried to sell me a jar of tiger balm. I told him I didn’t want it. He nodded and said, “That is a pity. I thought you might be my first sale of the day.” There was no performance in his voice, no pressure. I believed him. Which meant he’d been out there since morning, empty-handed, waiting for a single small win.

What struck me wasn’t his desperation, but his composure. He would go home that night having sold nothing and return the next day to do the same thing again.

It was around this time that I began to notice the trade-off India makes. The same philosophy that allows people to accept uncertainty, to surrender to the moment, also leaves millions frighteningly exposed. Faith replaces planning. Endurance substitutes for infrastructure. Peace is often found at the cost of stability.

This mindset extends beyond poverty. One morning, I met a labourer who hadn’t worked in weeks and was down to his last few rupees. Two weeks later, I saw him again, this time smiling. He’d found work, earned enough to live for the next week, and was now relaxing. When I asked what he would do after that, he shrugged, genuinely confused by the question.

To him, the future wasn’t a problem to solve, it was something that would arrive when it arrived.

In the West, we live at the opposite extreme. We struggle to be present because we are always managing risk, hedging against uncertainty, and planning several steps ahead. Our stability is bought with anxiety. In India, peace is often bought with precarity. Neither approach is clean. Neither is entirely enviable.

People who return from India often say they come back changed, though they struggle to articulate how. Their lives don’t become simpler. They don’t suddenly renounce ambition or abandon structure. Instead, something subtler happens. They keep their routines, their schedules, their goals, but occasionally they pause long enough to notice themselves breathing inside it all.

Maybe that’s why India keeps calling people back. Not because it provides answers, enlightenment, or transformation, but because it briefly interrupts the story we tell ourselves about control. It reminds us, sometimes uncomfortably, that life is happening whether we are managing it or not.

And perhaps that small disturbance is enough to justify the pull.